


The Truth Is Still Out There

by bugsuit



Category: Archer (Cartoon)
Genre: Aliens, Friendship, Gen, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 11:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5867566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bugsuit/pseuds/bugsuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pam calls the only other person who doesn't think it was an electric wang fiasco. They work their way through it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Truth Is Still Out There

It’s been, what, three days? Pam is pretty sure she should be back into the swing of things by now. Back to normal, whatever that was when you worked at ISIS, and at the goddamn _least_ she should have a drink in her hand right now.

But she isn’t and she doesn’t and she’s been staring at the clock for what feels like _hours,_ and it still reads 2:04.

It ticks to 2:05, and Pam swipes her phone off the table. Her fingers tap around until she’s got a number she rarely texts, listed under the name “FRANKENHITLER” that she’s pretty sure Archer wrote when he stole her phone at the bar.

She types out several text messages, and deletes all of them in turn. Text doesn’t feel right, so she pushes down her misgivings and presses the call button. There’s no one else she feels like talking to right now.

The phone rings for ages and ages and she considers hanging up, but then Krieger’s bubbliest PR voice cuts in. _“The Doctor is out! If this is Ms. Archer calling about the movement sensor alarm at the lab, don’t worry about it – it can’t get out of the reinforced door, and I’ll deal with it in the morning. If this is neither Ms. Archer, nor a colleague, nor a potential investor: please never call this number again.”_

She manages to wedge in a curse just before the answer machine beeps, and then she takes a breath.

“Hiii, this is Pam Poovey,” she says, deciding that with Krieger it’s best to be specific, “I was just wondering – well, I know it’s 2AM, but if you’re not busy on some batshit invention, maybe you could give me a call back. It’s not… _super_ important.” She pauses, and inwardly curses when she instinctively takes a deep breath for the next part and realises it’s going to be audible on the tape. “So, if you’re still skulking around past the witching hour, give me a call back. Or don’t. Uh… yeah,” she finishes awkwardly.

She’s just pulling the phone away from her ear to hang up when the line clicks and shuffles, and Krieger’s voice cuts in urgently.

“Pam? Pam!”

“Krieger!”

“Don’t hang up,” he says, and she’s left with a long, awkward silence to think about how hoarse his voice is. “Did you hang up?”

“Still here, Krieger. I thought you were gonna say something.”

“I was,” he mutters, his voice _way_ too quiet. “I forgot what it was.” He sounds equal parts confused and irritated, like this has been a recurring theme lately, and he waits for her to fill in the blanks.

Pam thinks about this for a moment. “You forget anything else?”

It’s a gentle nudge in the direction of why she called, but it’s something. They’re both dancing around the topic like skittish ballerinas, but they’ll get there, if Krieger doesn’t wig out and hang up. He doesn’t sound great, actually.

“You called about… aliens, right?”

Pam frowns. “Of course I’m calling about the stupid aliens!”

Krieger gives a relieved sigh. “Oh, good. Good, good, good. I wasn’t sure.”

The line goes silent again, and Pam thinks she can hear Krieger rattling around in his lab. He’s left his phone on speaker, and she can hear a faint echo of her own voice when she speaks next.

“You okay?”

“Yes,” he says, and then, “no. Nope.” There’s some more clattering of metallic equipment, and Pam guesses he might be tidying up for once.

It’s weird to ask Krieger how he is, but it’s even weirder to get an answer like that. They all know Krieger is a fucking weirdo, and for lack of an understanding, they all just have him pegged as someone you don’t ask too many questions about. Krieger is a lone wolf with some freaky hobbies and whether or not he’s ‘okay’ is not something anybody needs to know, or something Krieger needs to be asked.

Usually.

“You wanna-?”

“Can I-?” They both go silent, and Pam hears him clear his throat. She lets him talk. “…Can I come over?”

She doesn’t think too hard about it, because it’s 2:11 and she’s always thought that’s one of those times when you don’t overthink things. “Yeah,” she says begrudgingly. “You have my address, right?”

“I have everyone’s address,” he says, but it’s too plain and forced and for a second Pam thinks, _he’s trying too hard._ She wrestles the thought down while he speaks again. “Is there parking?”

“Yes, if your van’s still shady and unrobbable.” It is. She’s seen it.

“I will be right over.”

 

* * *

 

 

Krieger is a mess.

“You look like _shit.”_

He gives a weird little hum of agreement and waits there until she beckons him past the threshold, like a scruffy vampire who smells like formaldehyde and sweat. Pam scrunches up her nose.

“You also smell like shit.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Haven’t been too focused lately.”

“You and me both. But seriously, you wanna use my shower?”

Krieger looks unusually grateful, peels himself out of the stained lab coat, and heads straight for the bathroom. Pam doesn’t question why he knows where it is, or why he didn’t shower before he headed over. She waits until she hears the thump of clothes falling to the floor, then raps on the door and tells him to throw his clothes out to her.

Half an hour later, they’re sitting in total silence on the beat-up couch in the main room of her apartment. Krieger is in a borrowed bathrobe and Pam is still in her comfy jogging pants and a vest, and a while ago she switched the TV on just for some background noise that wasn’t the rhythmic churn of the washing machine.

“Smoke?” she offers, and they both know she's not strictly talking about nicotine.

He flinches, two parts crazy Krieger-brand paranoia and one part what might actually be genuine human stress. “Nnnno. I don’t… think I want that right now.”

“Me either.” Pam gets the feeling he's tried out most of the usual go-tos, given the illegal way his clothes smelled, but he's sober now and that says a hell of a lot about his mood. She stares at the television screen and shrugs. “Coffee?”

Krieger opens his mouth like he’s going to say yes, then rethinks it. When he finally speaks again, his voice is small and unfamiliar. “Do you have hot chocolate?”

Pam glances at him, and the moment she looks around he suddenly looks away, his face all knitted up with uncertainty and complicated thought processes. She nods.

“Yeah, okay. That actually sounds like a good idea.”

It’s another two commercial breaks later, when they each have a mug of chocolate and whipped cream and sprinkles, that Pam decides it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room.

Pam reaches for the remote and lowers the volume. Krieger move, but she knows he saw the bars going down because he just tensed up. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding nuts,” she begins carefully, “but you saw what I saw, right?”

“What did you see?” he asks in a guarded voice, and takes a sip of his hot chocolate. The cream leaves a frothy print on his upper lip. “Because I’ve seen a lot of things."

“Don’t be a dick, Krieger.” When he still says nothing, she sighs and says, “I saw some fucking _aliens_  is what I _saw.”_ He glances sharply at her. “I saw some god damn motherfucking aliens in Area Goddamn 51.”

“I didn’t stick my dick in an outlet,” he mumbles.

“I know, Krieger, I just said I was there.”

“It was _aliens.”_

“I _know.”_

Krieger inhales slowly through his nose. Pam realises he’s convincing himself, not her, and she lets him mutter for a while until his hands start trembling around his drink. Pam gently takes it out of his hands and sets it on the floor by their feet.

It’s sort of scary to see Krieger shaken up so badly. She was hoping he could be the rock in this little night-time experience - she always thought Krieger was kind of unflappable when it came to the weird shit he's into - but apparently he’s more human than she was ready to admit, because even though he’s clean now he still looks like he's pretty messed up on the inside.

“You got a little cow-lick on your forehead,” she says, interrupting the unsteady stream of muttering. “Right above your eyebrow.”

“Everything they told me,” he says quietly, “is just _dissolving.”_

Pam reaches over to fix his hair for him, and wonders if he’s going to be like this all night. Honestly, she doesn’t mind all that much. It saves her trying to make conversation, which is a blessing since she has absolutely no idea what to talk about with Krieger the goddamn mad science Nazi clone pig-fucker.

He studies her palm while she’s got her hand in front of his face, and then when his hair is more or less in order and she moves away, Krieger’s eyes drop to his hot chocolate and he leans down to pick it up again.

“I’m forgetting _all_ of it. It’s like sand dropping through a funnel.”

“Yeah,” she says, and drinks most of her hot chocolate in one long go.

“O-or,” he stutters, “or a, or a big – like a big _sink,_ and the plug is just... _pulled out_ slightly.”

Pam shifts in her seat to unpin her leg, sticking it out in front of her and waggling her toes to get rid of the staticky feeling. “You think it was stuff we simple humans weren’t meant to know?”

Krieger makes a high-pitched wavering _hmmm_ and then Pam hears him sniff. Her head twists to look at him so fast she thinks she might have gotten whiplash.

“Hey,” she says carefully, and then realises she didn’t have anything to follow it up with. “Drink up.”

Krieger obediently raises his mug to his lips and just lets it sit there for a second, his eyes all watery and unnatural, and then remembers to actually tip the thing enough to get a mouthful of sprinkles and cream. “They called me Algernop,” he says through the cream.

“That’s your name, right?”

“I think I have memory loss.”

Pam goes very still.

The television chatters away about tacky diamond jewellery and kitchen appliances that only sound good at 3AM, and because it’s still only 2AM, they can both safely ignore it just enough to think.

“I keep forgetting things,” he explains, seeming to realise that Pam isn’t quite sure how to ask.

“You mean like your name, or…?”

“No,” he says quickly, “no. I’m _definitely_ Algernop. But I - I wasn’t sure. Ab-about a lot of things. After San Marcos. The clones. Then the _aliens.”_

“You’re gibbering a little.” She nudges him to jar him out of the deer-in-headlights stare he’s giving the TV, and he blinks at her. “Didn’t you fall or something?”

“Yeah, I mean, I fell from… I think I broke something. Or a few things.” He takes a drink of his hot chocolate and sniffs again. “And nobody asked where I was, so. That was awkward.”

“We thought you were off doin’ weird science, Oingo Boingo, chill.” She does give him a full-body nudge, though, because Krieger keeps drifting off into distraction and every time she makes physical contact it seems to bounce him back to the now. She can’t believe she’s trying to cheer up Krieger, of all people, like he’s… _people._ “Where would we be without the ISIS pet scientist?”

Krieger looks like he feels maybe a tiny bit better, but it’s hard to tell with his hands still trembling like that.

“I give it a week.”

“Hm?”

“A week,” he repeats, “before we’ve forgotten everything they told us.”

“Yeah. It’s really slippin’, huh.” She swirls her hot chocolate in circles. “Honestly, it was kind of givin’ me a headache. Maybe it’s better this way.”

“But – the _knowledge,”_ he whines, and Pam instinctively pats him on the shoulder.

“Easy, X Files. It’s gonna be o-kay.”

Krieger doesn’t look convinced. He actually looks a lot like a little kid who’s lost their comfort blanket or something, which isn’t doing wonders for the category she’s had him in all this time – Scary And Probably At Least 2% Inhuman.

So she leaves her hand on his shoulder, and for the next half an hour, they watch the late-night shopping channel until it finishes and lapses into placeholder broadcasting.

“Are you in any danger of getting a boner right now?” Pam asks. Krieger considers this for a moment.

“…Nope. Not in the mood. Why do you ask?”

Pam turns sideways on the couch and eases her head down onto his lap, unfazed by the single layer of cotton padding between her head and his crotch. She waggles the TV remote in his face until he takes it.

“Is there anything on?” he asks vacantly, very deliberately not looking at her, and she prays to all that is holy that he doesn’t change his mind about the erection thing.

“What am I, that TV guide on the other side of the room? Try the channels, dickweed.”

“And... you _don’t_ want me to leave,” he clarifies carefully, not sounding like he really wants to know the answer.

“Try to stop me using your crotch as a pillow, and I’m getting out the bum shockers.”

Krieger looks cowed, but also kind of relieved. “Noted.”

They stay like that for the rest of the night. At some point, Pam reasons she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knows, there’s light peeking in between the cheap shutter blinds and it’s nearly time to start getting ready for work.

Even after just a few days, all of the brain-bending bullshit the extra-terrestrials told her is dripping out of her head like a leaky faucet. Forbidden knowledge or not, she’s kind of willing to hope Krieger’s right about the ‘one week’ thing, because it really was a headache to deal with. Maybe for the moment, Pam thinks, she’s actually pretty okay with living out a tiny life on Sagan’s stupid blue dot. It’s pretty serviceable, she thinks. Not so bad. Aliens and their headachey existentialism can suck it.

She turns very slightly so that she can hang her leg over the side of the couch, and realises she can hear Krieger’s faint snoring. And sort of feel it through his crotch. Still no sleep-boner, though, which is great because she’s not going to be in the mood for dick until the alien crap has blown over, and anyway it’s _Krieger._

Five more minutes, then. Or ten. Or, you know, however long until Malory calls her up to screech.

**Author's Note:**

> I am the only one posting in the Archer section right now and it's scary business, but since when has that ever stopped anybody?? Never, that's when. Please accompany me into Archer hell guys. If my writing doesn't completely blow, I'd love to hear I'm not alone. :^)


End file.
